The buildings were dreamlike in the darkness—dull, black shapes, their outlines softened by snow and dim moonlight. Heron moved through them silently, haunting the world like a living ghost. Her stealth training was so ingrained, her skills so perfectly honed, that she left no footprints as she walked, no signs, no traces whatsoever of her passing.

If she didn’t choose to leave a mark, no one would ever be able to tell that she’d been there at all.

Another shape appeared in the falling snow, low and lean. A wolf or a wild dog, sniffing hungrily through the dim gray void in a desperate search for sustenance. Heron raised her rifle silently, ready to kill it on instinct as a potential threat. Her finger hovered over the trigger. She watched the wolf stop, tense as a spring, and then burst into motion, racing through the street after a tiny white target—a cat or a rabbit, both hunter and hunted kicking up a frenzied spray of snow in their wake. The wolf pounced, shook its head three times, and the rabbit was dead in its jaws. Dark blood dripped down to the snow.

This is life, thought Heron. Not a peace treaty, not an idealistic dream, but a grim dance of death and survival. The strong live on while the weak—the ones too small or too foolish to fight back—die in agony and blood. Kira wants a world of rabbits, safe in their warren, happy and communal and oblivious to reality, but the real world is out here. A hunter in the snow. Life is a lone wolf, scratching out a living with teeth and claws and a heart of stone. The wolf shook its prey again, ensuring the kill, but didn’t stop to feast right there in the street. It looked up, still oblivious to Heron’s ghostly presence, and padded off between the drooping houses and the snow-covered boulders of old, sagging cars. Heron followed it, curious to see where the wolf deemed it safe enough to pause and eat its kill. It slipped through holes in fences, jumped over fallen trees and power lines, and all the while she followed it, watching, waiting. At last it came to its den, a crawl space below a dilapidated house, and crawled through the narrow tunnel it had dug through the snow. Heron crept up behind it, peering in softly.

The wolf laid the rabbit on the floor and watched in maternal silence as four small cubs yipped and snapped at it, eager for a meal. The mother turned toward the entrance, looking straight at Heron, and her dark eyes gleamed green in the dim, reflected light.

Heron watched the children eat, and she cried.

Chapter Forty-six

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX